COOPER SCHOOL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
*EDITED DRAFT
Bruce Schwald and Holly Schwald
Audiotape
[This is an interview with Bruce Schwald and Holly Schwald on November 20, 2004.
The interviewer is Greg Follett. The transcriber is Judy Bentley.]
GF: Today I’m conducting an interview with Bruce Schwald and Holly Schwald
as part of the Cooper School Oral History Project. Bruce is Holly’s father. Both of them
are lifelong Delridge neighborhood residents and former students at Cooper School. In
addition to that Bruce’s mother, June Marie McLoughlin, was also a lifelong resident of
Delridge and attended Cooper School in the mid-30’s and early 40’s. Today we’re going
to interview Bruce initially about his mother’s experience and how his family came, the
family history. So Bruce, how is it that your family first came to live; when was it, and
how did they come to live here?
BS: Well, I believe my grandmother and grandfather married and moved at the bottom of
Genesee Hill, by the park, and my father and his mother and father, my grandparents,
were living kitty-corner from them, and they got to know each other quite well.
GF: So what year was it when they first moved over there to the Genesee Hill area?
BS: Well, it must have been when my mother was quite small. My grandparents just got
together. So I imagine it would have been in the early [19]30’s, [19]32,[19]33.
GF: Before that, where did your grandparents live?
BS: Oh, boy. Well, my mother, I believe, originally came from Bellevue. My greatgrandparents had quite a lot of property over there, and my father originally came from—
my grandfather originally came from the Green Lake area. I believe they had quite a big
hunk of land over there, extended from Kenmore down to the Green Lake area, mostly
swamp at the time that… yeah. I believe they owned that up until, oh, the mid-30’s.
During the Depression they lost it. Back taxes. Government bought it from them, I
believe, for $1 an acre, something like that. Times were hard back then.
My mom went to Cooper Elementary, and so did I, and it was kind of a coincidence that
we had the same kindergarten teacher, the same teacher.
*Edited by Judy Bentley
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GF: What was her name?
BS: Mrs. [Merle] Madden. I believe she was in her early 80’s and mandatorily had to
retire the year after teaching me [laughs].
GF: Which was in …?
BS: Oh, I think that must have been around ’62 when I was in kindergarten, and I
remember she was quite a scary lady for her age for a small kid. She walked with a cane
and was very stern for us small youngsters. [Laughs.] Oh, I have a few memories of
Cooper, growing up there. I believe my first grade teacher was Mrs. [Gloria] Bergren,
and my daughter also had the same first grade teacher, Mrs. Bergren, at Cooper
Elementary. As I grew up there, I was gone for a couple of years through the school,
here and there as we moved around, but we always seemed to rebound back to the area. I
believe I went into the fourth grade and around that time it was kind of a Beatlemania
going on. I had an older sister what was really into the Beatles and dressed me up like
one, got me the overcoat and the Beatle boots, even got me a Beatle wig, but I wouldn’t
wear it.
GF: For what occasion?
BS: Oh, it was just a birthday or something; I can’t quite remember.
GF: Can you tell me, can you remember your first day of school? What did you think of
your kindergarten teacher the first time that you met her? What was her name? Did you
know at that time that it was the same teacher your mother had had?
BS: Oh no. No. I had no idea. I believe that was one of the rare occasions I got driven
to school. My sister got a ride at the time. She was a couple of grades ahead of me; I
believe she was in second grade when I started kindergarten. I think I remember recess
the first day more than anything, the crowded playground, the different age kids on the
different sides. I think it was separated, girls on one side, boys on the other, at recess. It
was kind of migrated, er uh, immigrated , whatever you want to say..
GF: Segregated.
BS: Segregated. Yeah, segregated playgrounds. And there was one kid which stood out
in kindergarten, what was like two feet taller than all the other kindergarteners [laughs].
And he ended up being my best man at my wedding. [GF laughs.] But at the time…
GF: What was his name?
BS: His name was John Dow.
GF: Really, and you met him that first day of school.
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BS: Oh yeah. Right off the bat I think they were teasing him being Dow the big Cow or
something like that because he was so tall and big for his age. He wasn’t really that
chunky; he was just enormous. [They both laugh.] Well, he would chase us, but, of
course, us little guys could run real fast. And then I remember one day turning around
and there he was—big bear hug. [Laughs.] I think we were friends from then on.
[Laughs.] Yeah, it was…
GF: So you made some lifelong friends there at Cooper School then.
BS: Oh yeah. Quite a few. Quite a few people went to…, didn’t really move out of the
area.
GF: So you say that the first day was one of the few days that you got a ride to school.
How did you normally get to and from school?
BS: Well, we lived up off of Brandon where the old fruit stand used to be, and it was
probably about a half-mile walk, and like I said I had a sister what was a few grades
ahead of me, and so I walked with her and the rest of the troops walking down Delridge
Way to the school … at the time—
GF: Rain or shine?
BS: Oh yeah. Rain or shine.
GF: What time did you have to be to school in the morning?
BS: I believe school at the time was 8:30, quarter to nine; it was quarter to nine: 8:45. I
was a morning kindergartener. I believe it was only a half a day class in kindergarten.
They had a morning and an afternoon classes. And in the afternoon, usually my dog was
there to walk me home. I had a dog what waited on the other side of the overpass. It was
usually there ritually, waiting to walk me home [laughs].
GF: You’re talking about the pedestrian overpass there by Cooper School.
BS: Right.
GF: The dog would wait there.
BS: The dog would wait there on the other side because he got in trouble for going to
school one time and they took him down to the pound, and my mom had to get him back
out, so he knew not to cross the overpass. He waited [laughs] and walked us home. He
did that for quite a few years. He was there daily.
GF: Were there any other kids that you walked with?
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BS: Oh. Yes. There was quite a few what lived up our way.
GF: Did you ever go down, did you ever have occasion to go down on Longfellow Creek
and play down there?
BS: Oh that was our favorite place, playing at the crick or the golf course, collecting golf
balls. Oh yeah. We had great times down there, playing with hydroplanes when
hydroplanes were first getting popular back in the early 60’s or what have you. We were
making little wooden replicas and floating them on strings up and down the crick.
[laughs] Yeah, it wasn’t quite as clean back then as it is now. They’ve cleaned it up
quite a bit, but it was still somewhere where us kids kind of congregated, around the
crick, up and down the golf course, anywhere we shouldn’t have been. And there was
always Camp Long. It was always a fun place to venture into.
GF: So what kind of work did your father do while you were .. while he moved over here
from the Green Lake area? Or was that your grandfather?
BS: That was my grandfather. My grandfather worked at Boeings from probably World
War II right on through into the mid-60’s when he retired. My father decided he’d
become a merchant marine when he was a kid. Shipped out I believe when he was 15,
dummied up a birth certificate saying he was 16, went to China for a year, slow boat to
China he called it [laughs] and did quite well for himself.
After he met my mom and they got married, he would do other jobs occasionally,
too, and stay home for a few years at a time. Like he was a roofer, and I remember him
working on the Seattle School Board roofing crew, and they were roofing Cooper School
when we got out of school one day, and I saw my dad up on the roof, and I yelled up to
him, “Hey Dad. Can I have a nickel?” for the way home at the store, buy ice cream or..,
and my dad would throw a nickel down and I’d miss, and of course it was right out in
front of the school where all of the kids kind of congregated to go home. And everybody
was jumping for the nickel and so I didn’t get it, so my dad would try to throw another
nickel down, and I think he threw about, oh, 50 cents worth of nickels down trying to get
me one, and I never did get one, but he sure made a lot of kids happy [laughing].
GF: So during the time you were growing up, then he was gone out to sea at times.
BS: Yeah, he’d be gone for three to six months at a time, and then home as long, too.
GF: Didn’t you mention that his father worked over on the shipyards along by West
Marginal?
BS: My mother’s father. Yeah, my mother’s father worked in the shipyards on the
Duwamish for years. He was a shipbuilder.
GF: When was that, back in the 30’s or prior to that?
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BS: That was the 30’s, 40’s, before the big changeover.
GF: So none of your family ever worked at the steel mill then?
BS: Oh, no. A few of my dad’s friends were steel mill workers for long time, worked at
Bethlehem Steel. I knew quite a few people who worked there. One of my best friends
worked there for 15-20 years before they closed down and changed ownership and so on.
He worked for the old Bethlehem Steel.
GF: Can you tell me some of the ways that the neighborhood has changed since the days
when you were walking to school back in the 60’s? When you look up and down
Delridge Avenue [Way], what are the things that you notice that have noticeably
changed?
BS: Oh, there’s been quite a few changes. It [didn’t use to be?] used to be a four-lane
road; at the time there was two-lanes, both directions, and traffic was quite heavy. Up
from the school at the corner we used to have an old rec center. There’s been many a
school [?] built there. And across the street from that was the old Datsun dealer. I
remember admiring the cars as we walked by. They only had like three or four new cars,
I believe, in the showroom and quite a few used cars, but it always caught our eye,
looking at all these new-fangled Datsuns [laughs].
GF: That’s down by Andover?
BS: That’s where Southwest Plumbing is now, used to be the Datsun dealer. And up
from there used to be the grocery store what, when I was really young, was a German guy
who had a butcher shop in the grocery store. And he sold out the grocery store part to
Mr. Quan and kept the meat part for a few years, and then Mr. Quan took over the meat
half, too, and opened up the whole store into one store and had it right on through the
time I was, oh boy, probably in my early 30’s, brand new establishment. And up from
there, I remember where the Jackpot gas station is now, used to be a fruit stand, used to
be Binghamton’s fruits, and I remember always stopping in there and getting a banana or
whatever, looking around at all the fruit until they chased us out of there. “If you aren’t
going to buy anything, you kids get out of here.” We’d be eating their strawberries,
grapes.
And, uh, let’s see, up on the next block, I believe there was a red brick drugstore,
and now I believe it is a Stop n Go grocery, but they used to have a sundae bar at it, and
that would be one of our favorite things to do. I think we got 50 cents and we’d go up
there and get a burger and a large Coke and a bag of chips or sometimes just go up and
get a big huge sundae for 50 cents, sit up at that big old-fashioned sundae bar. Two old
ladies what ran it, and of course it was our place to get all our candy. They had
everything.
GF: Did you ever have occasion to venture up into the Westwood area?
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BS: The Westwood area. More up towards where Westwood Village is now. We used
to follow the creek occasionally quite a ways up past where the K-Mart used to be and all
the way across, yes we did. It was more of a marshy, swampy kind of place. Kind of
mucky, but we kind of stayed out of there. Oh yeah, we were at one end to the other, and
when I was a kid I believe the other end dumped into the holding pits at Bethlehem Steel
where they refuged water for cooling steel. There was these smelly old black pits down
there but now nicely been cleaned up, and there’s a nice gym sitting in the area [laughs].
GF: So, uh, can you describe some of the other kids that were in the school at the time?
BS: Yeah, there was quite a few different… a variety of kids. I had the opportunity to
have one of my friends be Mormon, what lived up on Pigeon Hill, and I got along with
him pretty well for quite a while until the parents really didn’t think it was a good idea for
us to be friends because I was Christian and they were of different faith, and that he
should play with friends of his own faith. They were really kind of … really fanatics, old
school, you might say, people, wanted to keep their congregation together or whatever.
GF: Well, speaking of that, was there any ethnic diversity in the school at the time? Was
there any blacks or Native Americans? Did you have any Asians going there?
BS: There was quite a variety; there was a few black families in the area. I remember I
think as we went into junior high, it became more noticeable. It was more of an overrun.
We were more of the minorities, I think, by the time we got to junior high. Elementary, I
mean there was just more or less a trace of minority and ethnic groupings.
GF: Predominantly white, then.
BS: It was predominantly white. Well, I really can’t say white. We had Italians, we had
a few Mexicans, we had a couple colored—black—families, but yeah, predominantly
white, I would say, probably 80%. Boy, I don’t know. There’s so many years in between
me and Cooper.
GF: I know. It’s looking back a long way. So, maybe did you participate in any school
clubs or organizations while you were there? Did you participate in school government
or any school plays?
BS: I don’t think I was more of the talented one. I was more, uh, I remember working in
the school cafeteria in sixth grade. I thought that was a big honor, to get to be picked to
work in the cafeteria, wash dishes, but we got teacher lunches, different food than
everybody else [laughs], a special privilege. And I remember at the time delivering
lunches to the teachers’ lounge. Times were different back then because you opened up
the door and you couldn’t see across the room, there was so many teachers smoking in
the lunchroom, teachers’ lunchroom. Yeah, it was quite different. They didn’t think so
much about smoking back in the 60’s as they do now. I mean it would never happen in a
school property, I don’t think.
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GF: Well that’s probably very true. What do you remember about lunchtime?
BS: I remember that the cafeteria was the auditorium also. The tables were folded all up,
rolled to the side; the chairs were turned around, and there was a stage up in the front of
the cafeteria. So, yeah, we saw our plays there and so on, uh, assemblies, introductions.
I also remember the gym quite well…art.
GF: What kind of things did you do in P.E. class?
BS: I think Soak-em was our favorite game. Or a little basketball maybe. But I still
think that Soak-em—or whatever you want to call it—throwing the balls at each other,
knocking each other out of the game, having to stand in the line, that was one of our
favorites p.e.’s [laughs]. I also remember a little bit about, like, we had a Cooper carnival
day in the park where we’d have different events, and you’d have races. There was quite
a few neat things going on… vaguely, vaguely in my memory way in the past.
GF: Did you ever participate in Cub Scouts or any after-school sports or anything like
that?
BS: I did finally become a Boy Scout. I never was a Cub Scout; I never really got into it
too much. I think I was too busy playing over on the golf course and having a good old
time. But some of our other friends from Admiral Way and a pair of boys I knew talked
me into going to Boy Scouts with them, and I went to the Fauntleroy Church was where
our troop was. I think I stuck with it for a couple years. I have a few good memories of
camp outs and …
GF: Do you have any memories of any time when you may have gotten in trouble at
school?
BS: Trouble. Trouble. I was always in trouble for something. I was a normal kid.
Grade school, no. I think I made it through grade school out of trouble, but by the time I
got to junior high it was …
GF: At Cooper School, you never had occasion to go down to the principal’s office?
BS: No. Cooper School I think in sixth grade a lot of my other friends were getting into
trouble for things I was doing the same as them, but I really just kind of whizzed by it
without really getting caught doing anything disastrous.
GF: Were you ever injured at school? Who would take care of you if you were injured?
BS: Oh, I had bruises and so on, I remembered having a grey-haired nurse, elderly
woman. But I believe she was only in the school so many days a week, and she did two
different schools. I think she might have did Lafayette Elementary, too, up on the hill.
Part-time nurse. If it was something serious, they’d call your parents to come and get
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you. If you went to the office and the nurse wasn’t there, they’d just call the parents and
say, “Your child is here sick. Please come and get him.”
GF: If you could sum up your experiences in Cooper School—I know there were many
of them—but if you could sum it all up in one word, what would it be?
BS: Lifetime memories and many friendships made, lifetime friendships. Yeah, friends.
GF: So you would say that having gone to Cooper School was a very formative,
influential experience.
BS: Yes, it was. I think in your early school years really set the way for your
development for the rest of your schooling and your social aspect also. It’s your first
really encounter with kids in a massive society [laughs]—group—is through your early
years through kindergarten sixth grade is really that … sets a lot of values, and I think we
had good ones at the time. That’s how the Delridge area, Pigeon Hill area changed
through the years, from good to bad to back to pretty good through the years. I remember
some pretty wild times and oh almost gangs driving up and down the streets with Uzie’s.
When you looked out your window it was kind of scary. But I think in the past ten years
our society has really cleaned itself up in the area.
GF: You’ve seen improvements in the Delridge area over the past few years, then?
BS: Oh, yeah. All our communities have their problems. I don’t think ours are any
worse than any of the others nowadays.
GF: Are you active in any way currently?
BS: I’m active on our blockwatch. Other than that…. I should say my wife more or less
is. I’m definitely a moral supporter.
GF: And speaking of support, how have you supported your family? You chose to live
in the Delridge neighborhood where you grew up; you purchased a house down off of …
BS: Twenty-fifth, right close to old Cooper School, within blocks of it. I became a meatcutter out of high school and I spent fifteen years in a local meat shop, baking hams,
baking sausage, strictly pork. Some of you might be knowledgeable to the name of
Lennon’s, Lennon’s Meat-packing. They were quite famous in the area. Oh, after that I
got into airport ground support equipment, and the building of and supplying for upkeep
of airlines, keeping the planes in the skies. I’ve been doing that for the past 11, 12 years.
Quite enjoy it. So I guess I have been kind of sticking with the culture of the area,
feeding people and now the airlines. Boeing’s is one of our biggest industries in the area
and always has been. There’s a lot of sideline work to the airlines. They’re going to be
around for a long time.
GF: Do you think that Delridge has been a good neighborhood to raise your family?
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BS: Yes, I do. Like you were mentioning, they have the Longfellow Creek area, Camp
Long, the Delridge Park, and quite a big group of kids grew up with our kids, and they
made some lifelong friends, too, also I believe.
GF: How did you meet your wife?
BS: I met my wife renting a house next door to my mom and dad’s.
GF: Where?
BS: Right off of 26th and Brandon.
GF: How old were you?
BS: At the time, I think I was just turning 17. Yeah. And we never really were apart
after that. Finally decided to get married, I believe, I had just turned 20. On my dad’s
birthday we got married, and been together ever since happily.
GF: And her family’s from the Delridge neighborhood, too, right?
BS: Yes, it is. Her mother still resides off of Holden, close to Chief Sealth High School.
GF: When she grew up in the area, did she attend Cooper School as well?
BS: No, she didn’t. She was a West Seattleite. I believe they went to Lafayette and West
Seattle High School.
GF: But your children went to Cooper?
BS: All of my children have went to Cooper School. And matter of fact, I brought my
daughter with me, and she could carry on a lot fresher conversation.
INTERVIEW WITH HOLLY SCHWALD
GF: Okay. All right. Holly , I guess that’s your cue. This is Holly Schwald, Bruce’s
daughter. Went to Cooper for how many years?
HS: Until the fifth grade, because at the time elementary was only kindergarten through
fifth grade, and then you went off to middle school. I went to Cooper probably 1985 is
when I started going there in kindergarten, and I went there through the closure of the
school in 1998 when I was [interrupted]… Did I say..
BS: ‘89
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HS: ‘89. Sorry, 1989, and I just finished the third grade and I was going into the fourth
grade when Cooper School moved to Louisa Boren, down the street on Delridge Way.
And continued to go there for the fifth grade until I graduated from Cooper.
GF: So you were in attendance the final day of school there at Cooper School.
HS: Yes, I was. I can’t say that I remember exactly what happened, but I remember
shortly before the school closed, just like my father did yearly when he went to Cooper,
they had their great carnival, that they would always have every year, and there was night
carnival, and there was a day kind of carnival for the kids where they set up the field
across the street, and they held all kinds of activities for us to play and we had book fair
where we could get stickers and books and do some reading, which was very educational
and really great that they found a way to involve the kids of my generation at school with
these kind of activities, which sometimes, well, I hope that they still doing in current
days.
GF: So, can you tell me about your first day? Do you remember anything about the first
day at Cooper?
HS: Real vaguely because I was traumatized. I was really worried, and I’m still that
kind of a person, about going and meeting new people and being away from the things
that I was familiar with. I remember driving down Pigeon Hill on the way to Cooper
School down at the bottom and just crying my eyes out, and my mom was trying to
console me, and nothing she could do could appease me until we go to class. I remember
just being very quiet and very still and kind of being very observant of what the other
kids were doing, and another little girl was obviously very very upset because my
greatest memory of the first day was her throwing up on this rug that that we all had to sit
around the corners of, and the teacher sat at one side and you know, taking 15 or 20
minutes to call the janitor in to have to clean up this rug so that we could continue to sit
on it, and really I think that memory just kind of made any other memory from the day
less memorable. [GF laughing.] It was fine. I remember kindergarten a lot.
GF: What was the name of your kindergarten teacher?
HS: See, this is where we come into conflict because my dad’s first-grade teacher, Miss
Thorngren [Bergren?], was my kindergarten teacher. And so Miss Thorngren was my
kindergarten teacher.
GF: Really?
HS: Yeah, and she was quite old at the time and I don’t think that she continued to teach
very much longer after us.
GF: So you dad had the same kindergarten teacher as his mother and you had the same
kindergarten teacher as your dad’s first grade teacher.
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HS: Yeah, the teachers were known to move around from grade to grade and tended to
jump, like my first-grade teacher, I think, was my brother’s third grade teacher. So when
she was teaching third-grade she jumped down to first-grade, depending on …
GF: So it sounds like they stayed at that school.
HS: Oh, yeah, definitely. I think if they were just looking for a change, they just jumped
to the different grade levels.
GF: So, uh, what was the neighborhood around the school? You mentioned that you
lived up on Pigeon Hill?
HS: At the top it kind of curves down to the bottom to 18th, and that’s where I grew up
for the first four years, five years of my… three? No, ‘cause I was still going down that
hill [side conversation with father]. Well, when I lived there, I was going to Cooper, just
for a short time, and then we... After that, we moved across town for one year, and I
continued to go to Cooper. My mom would drive me to school every day, and I still went
to Cooper. Because I remember I met my best friend ever when I was in the first grade
and she was in the second grade. We were across the hall from each other, had different
teachers. I got in trouble and had to sit outside the classroom, and she was lining up for,
like they had different recesses for different grade levels sometimes, and she was lining
up to go somewhere, I’m thinking recess, and I saw her standing across the hall, and
shortly after when we were living across town, my dad bought the house that’s now at the
end of the field on 25th and we ended up moving exactly across the street from this girl
that I kept seeing when I was getting in trouble and she was going out to her recess, and
we’d say hi to each other. We’re still best friends to this day, and we still have slumber
parties.
GF: What was her name?
HS: Her name is Christina, Christina Skills. She moved the year that Cooper closed so
when she was in the fourth grade, she ended up moving, two and a half hours away, to
Hoodsport canal, and around that area, but we still maintained our friendship, and she’d
come spend the summers over in my neighborhood, and we’d have to part early.
GF: So did you ever get involved with any activities at the school? Were you involved
with the band or school plays? Did you ever have occasion to perform on the stage in the
auditorium, in the cafeteria?
HS: Yeah, definitely. Besides also being part of the lunch crew and the crosswalk team,
I tried to help out in any way that I could. I liked doing that sort of thing. We would
have a yearly performance, and I performed two years in a row, and one year I got second
place. The first time I performed I danced a little jazz routine that I learned from my
little dance troupe that I was in at the time. And then next year, I can’t remember what
place I got, for some reason. I’ll have to go look at my trophies, but I got something, I
got a trophy. I can’t remember if it was second or third, but I know I didn’t get first place
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because there happened to be some older girls at the time when I was just in first or
second grade. They were like in the fifth grade, and they were really good. It was hard
to compare.
GF: So was the performance at night or during the day?
HS: It was during the day for the students, and a lot of mothers came because at the time
a lot of mothers were at-home mothers, or, like my mother, worked a lot of evenings
when she did have a job, when I was younger, so she was able to attend activities,
fieldtrips, all sorts of things, and my father did, too, all throughout the time I was at
Cooper. We got to go to a lot of great places. I remember visiting Washington Mutual’s
building when we were really young and going on a tour and we got to go to the zoo and
the observatory, all kinds of great places. Fieldtrips were really fun for us.
GF: So the building being 75 or so years old when you attended there didn’t really affect
the quality of your education then, you wouldn’t say.
HS: No. Maybe it might have affected our health at some times, but our education was
always, yeah, well in place. I just remember some really old, interesting bathrooms that
were divided by these huge tile-like, kind of like a wall separator that if you were tall
enough at the time you could get on the back of the toilet and crawl up on this divider and
look at all the girls down in the bathroom stalls, and a lot of times you’d fall off of it and
it wasn’t very good getting down, so I think that might have…
GF: Are you saying the boys were looking at the girls?
HS: No, just the girls because the separator just divided the stalls, and it was just this
huge tile separator in between. It’s interesting. And, yeah, the buildings were really,
really old, but we didn’t mind it much. I think we just figured that’s the way school was.
I had a lot of nightmares about school.
GF: Did you think it was a spooky place?
HS: Yeah, it was. At times, for a small child, I could say that at the time it was pretty
spooky compared to other establishments around the area, but it was nice. It was cool. I
appreciate it now that I’m older.
GF: So what about recess?
HS: Recess was great. Some of the equipment that we had to play with wasn’t the
greatest. You could really harden someone with the tether ball repeatedly that only
protected us from the cement on the ground by a one-inch rubber mat that was probably
only four feet wide and ten feet long.
[BS says something in background.]
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GF: You can participate, too. You didn’t have any rubber, huh? Just concrete.
BS: Concrete.
GF: [laughs] Did you have boys on one side and girls on the other?
HS: Oh no, it was mixed. I mean generally at that age boys have cooties and so you
don’t really want to partake in recess with them, so girls would play and do their girlie
things and boys would play and do their boy things, but sometimes the boys would harass
the girls or the girls would harass the boys or we would participate in some games
together like, let’s see, like dodgeball and stuff like that which was kind of hard when
you were playing against a boy, and I don’t know if this was a game that… I know that
they have this game in California and it’s called handball but we played with bigger, the
dodgeballs, and we just hit the ball against the wall, repeatedly, and that was our game
and it could [?] Yeah, I remember my brother in recess with us, me and my best friend at
the time.
GF: Holly , did you play in any sports at recess other than…?
HS: No, we weren’t really involved in sports in gym class. They didn’t really let you
play with the sports equipment besides balls. They just threw like 30 balls out into the
courtyard.
GF: What if it was raining outside?
HS: At the time, if anyone can remember, Cooper had these large doors at the back end
of the school, and inside were these just two wide open areas, and I can’t remember
exactly what’s in the middle, if it is just another entrance way into the school, but that’s
where we would play in if there was any rain or anything like that. They just let us loose
in there.
GF: Did you ever get into any trouble? Did you have to go to the principal’s office?
HS: Not that I .. I mean I remember like a lot of .. No, I don’t ever remember getting into
any
GF: Well you said you were sitting out in the hall in trouble.
HS: Yeah, but I never got sent to the principal’s office.
GF: What were you in trouble for?
HS: I believe it’s talking. Throughout my time at Cooper… Once in the fifth grade I
was moved to the back of the classroom for being too talkative to my girlfriends, and it
was very sad because I was just way, way back there behind everyone else. I couldn’t
talk to anyone without yelling to them. And…, it’s interesting.
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GF: What was the ethnic makeup of the school during those final years?
HS: I’d say it was definitely diverse, very much so. A lot of my friends… My best
friend was white, but my second best friend was Mexican. It’s funny how you still have
like a first, second, and third best friend, but it’s just in order of how I met them, so you
know, we have to have rules. And I remember a boy that lived right up the street. His
name was Kirk Abdul [sp.?] He was mixed Filipino and Native American, which is
really interesting but great to have that diversity. And that’s just out of the friends that I
personally made because I think at the time, you can only make so many friends. Those
are my close friends, so it was definitely diverse. There was just a wide range of students
at the time, I think and definitely in the area and even some are now [?] today.
GF: So how did you get to and from school?
HS: I walked to school with my brother and my best friend.
GF: From where? Where were you living at the time?
HS: When we lived on … by this time. I think that there was only one year that I came
to school that way [from Pigeon Hill] and then there was one year that I came over the
West Seattle Freeway to get here and then after that, that’s when we moved to 25th Ave.
I met my best friend right across the street. It was in the summer though, I believe when
we moved, and she came over when we were rolling down the neighbor’s abandoned-there was an old abandoned house that no one was living in at the time. We had
cardboard, and we were sliding down our front hill and rolling down the front hill and her
and her brother noticed us doing this and they thought that was really fun and so they
asked if they could go ahead and play with us, and ever since that day both of us, my
brother and her brother and me and her have been best friends.
GF: How old were you when you met?
HS: I’d say we were about six, five or six years old.
GF: And they went to Cooper School with you?
HS: Yeah, and they already lived there prior so they attended Cooper School and went
there their whole time but then, like I said, they moved when she went into the fourth
grade.
GF: So from the time you were in the second or third grade on, you just walked to
school.
HS: Yeah, and that was great. Like there were some … We had fun. I remember a
windstorm and I was trying to walk home from school, and like having to brace each
other and take steps. Like she had a butterfly backpack. It was just flopping away in the
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wind. It was crazy. Across the street was a field. All we had to do was walk across that
field. It seemed like it must have took us an hour.
GF: So did they have buses that brought kids in from other parts of town?
HS: I believe so, yeah, definitely, but not that many, which was interesting. I think that
most of the attendance of the school were kids of that area. There was probably like, I
couldn’t imagine more than ten buses that came in whereas now you see like 20 buses
going to take kids to school. It was interesting. Most of the kids just came from the area,
like the kids I made friends with were all kids that were in my area. My best friend
Bonita, who I said was my second-best friend, she lived right on Longfellow Creek, so
that was really cool, so we’d always go to her house and play down in the creek,
continually. And we played on the golf course and Camp Long as well, like we played
all those places.
GF: Same places that your dad grew up
HS: Yeah, and in the golf course, there’s all these little ravines separated all throughout
the golf course and we used to own them —like one was Holly ’s cavern [?]. And my
brother had the swampland—that was his. We had to know when we were there. It’s
weird like in our childhood minds we imagined like little house of forest. We were forest
people, and it was great playing in that. You don’t see a lot of kids go out and play
outside that much and use this great imagination that you do have available to you at that
age.
GF: Do you remember your favorite room in the school? What was your favorite room?
HS: Gym. Definitely gym. Because at the time of our school, and I’m surprised that my
dad didn’t have during his time because it just looked so old and rickety, but they had this
huge gymnasium set up that folded down against the wall and when we came into the
gym, they’d pull it out and it had monkey bars, swings, like—what are those things where
you clasp, hold on [rings?]—like anything that’s gymnastic was there. There was a big
net on the side that you could climb up. It was huge, just all this different stuff.
GF: Huge to a little kid, right?
HS: Yeah…
TAPE CUTS OUT: END OF SIDE A
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SIDE B
INTERVIEW WITH HOLLY SCHWALD, cont.
HS: …must have been like so small. You guys were like, oh…this is like two feet tall.
It just seemed to tower over me.
GF: So that was your favorite room, and you said you helped out at lunchtime. You
were a lunchroom helper?
HS: Yeah, that was really fun. Like I loved doing that.
GF: Do you remember who your favorite teacher was?
HS: My favorite teacher? I could definitely say that my favorite teacher was my fifth
grade teacher, Mr. [Michael] Jordan. He just made class so much… like at that time
when we changed schools after the old original Cooper closed down, and we moved over
to the Louisa Boren School, that’s where I had Mr. Jordan, and at the time my best friend
had just moved, and I think I was kind of like depressed because I loved doing my
homework, but I had a problem like turning it in—I wasn’t a very good student at the
time—but Mr. Jordan like totally turned that around. He made the class so much fun that
you couldn’t help but participate in the class and he captured your attention, and that’s
something that’s really hard to do for a kid that age whose mind is just racing all over the
place. So he was really great. He used to play jokes on us and all kinds of great things,
so I really enjoyed his class the most. I could say I learned the most from it.
GF: So, uh, you mentioned that you had an occasion to return to old Cooper School after
it closed. Could you tell me that story?
HS: Yes, this is my ultimate—like, I’ve never did anything bad, I swear—but yeah at the
time that it was just closed, there happened to be an entranceway into the school and it
was about two or three years after it closed down, and I was having friends over for a
birthday party cause I was turning 12 the next day, and we all decided that we wanted to
go down to the park, and we were playing at the park on all the equipment, and we’re
like, “Well, let’s go check out the school and see if we can go around to the back where
we used to play at recess time.” And so we were just playing around there, and we
decided that it would be even cooler if we could go inside and see all the stuff we used to
have in school. We didn’t want to do anything bad, we just wanted to look around and,
you know, just reminisce at the time that we had—cause my best friend was there—about
the time we had spent there in school with each other, so we entered the school, and we
were just looking around, and apparently some of the kids that were there were causing
trouble, but I wasn’t there because I was checking out the science room because that was
my favorite room in the Cooper School because it was decorated so wonderfully, like you
couldn’t help but stare at the walls and all the different diagrams and stuff that they had at
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the time, so I was checking that out, and then I just turned around and lo and behold Mr.
Officer was telling me that I was in a place that I shouldn’t have been in.
GF: A police officer?
HS: Yeah, a police officer.
GF: And you were eleven years old?
HS: I was going to be twelve the next day.
GF: And what happened?
HS: Oh, they booked us [laughs]. Our parents had to come pick us up. It was a very
interesting experience for an eleven-year-old to have to go to jail and be in a jail cell.
And he took us all the way across town, which was interesting, but now we have our own
Delridge precinct, so if it would have been now, I’m sure we would have went to that
one.
GF: What did you see when you went in there [the school]? What did you see?
HS: Mostly it was just very, like, dark and dusty, and I remember writing my name on
the floor in the dust because it was just so dirty from no one being in there for so long and
really just going into the science room and I remember looking out the window in one of
the bathrooms to the roof of the school. For some reason I don’t remember…. But those
are my …cause we didn’t really have much time before we tripped that sensor and they
got the cops on us [laughing].
GF: So were there any of the decorations or any of the existing furniture still in there?
HS: Yeah, a lot of stuff was piled though. A lot of desks were piled up against the
windows. A lot of … like just everything was really … they kind of like were in a hurry
they didn’t take any books with them, but a lot of books were thrown away in the
garbage, and I thought that was interesting. Like they were just like, we’re going to start
all over. But they might have been old, and they needed to be thrown away. You never
know.
GF: In order to conclude the interview, I have to ask the final question here, so if you
can sum up your experience at Cooper in one word, what word it be?
HS: Very awesome. Awesome. I had a lot of fun in elementary school. I could say
that that type of learning and experience is one of the best ones you have throughout your
life, just discover yourself and discovering why everything is in life and all of these new
facets of the world.
GF: Did you have a school library there?
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HS: Yes we did, and we had a bookstore, too, so where you could go in and get all these
books for like 25 cents, which is yours and you get to keep it and build your own world
little library, so we definitely had a library, but I don’t think I was found very much there.
You could find me more in the lunchroom, outside on the playfield..
BS: [unintelligible] library
HS: Thank you.
GF: Thank you for joining us today, and I hope that this interview has been productive as
far as criteria the Delridge Neighborhood Development Association is looking for. If it
is, then this interview could be contained in the Cooper School Oral History Project
which is going to be displayed on the ground floor level of the new arts center that’s
going in there, and it’s going to be developed by the DNDA within the next year and be
open within the next couple of years, and you might be able to go in there and see..
HS: Great they’re making that an art center. I just have to say, that’s great. Support the
arts!
GF: Anyway this could end up being part of that project, and we thank you for your
participation.
END OF INTERVIEW WITH HOLLY SCHWALD, November 20, 2004
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